This website is a first attempt to bring together various research projects and scholarly strains on humour that have been pursued in Europe (and not only) over recent decades. It all started at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in June 2012, when the memorable 24th conference of the International Society of Humor Studies was held there.

During the conference, the European Journal of Humour Research was founded and its first issue appeared in 2013. In the following years various networking projects and journals (such as the Israeli Journal of Humour Research or the RISU journal based in Italy) started emerging, with the study of humour in public slowly coming to the forefront. The three Polish-Estonian comparative projects were funded by Polish and Estonian Academies of Sciences started in the 2010s and have continued to this day. The UNA Europa Seed Fund of 2020 broke the fresh ground with Giselinde Kuipers of KU Leuven, Delia Chiaro of University of Bologna  and Władysław Chłopicki of the Jagiellonian University leading the way to analyse humour controversies. The CELSA Alliance Project and UNA Europa Research Acceleration Fund projects followed in 2022-2024, tackling the concept of humour scandals from the intercultural, diachronic and synchronic  perspectives. The efforts at developing a multicultural, pan-European project of cooperation culminated with the HUMLIT  project, funded by Marie Curie Staff Exchange Action for 2025-2028, with 25 institutions from 15 European countries, leaping into networking and secondments in order to research the concept of humour literacy. This is naturally not the end of the humour-related initiatives in Europe as the recent emergence of Italian GRISU Society testifies.